Journal of Family Therapy (1986) 8: 79-89

The child as go-between: consulting with parents and teachers

Denise Taylor t

In becoming a pupil a child also takes on the rBle of go-between and must negotiate daily the transitions from home to school. This puts the child in a triangular position in relation to his parents and teachers who often stand in a highly ambivalent relationship to each other, making it difficult for the child to keep a balance between the two systems. Coping mechanisms described include dissociating one system fromanother or skewing the triangle so that the child is cast in the r d e of victim either because the school or home is seen as unsatisfactory. The presence of ‘themes’ or issues around deprivation and authority, or the more familiar ‘care’ and ‘control’, aggravate the difficulties of the go-between. ‘Good’ parents are likely to produce ‘good’ pupils and successful go-betweens.

Introduction

The focus of this paper is the triangular relationship between parents, teachers and the child which comes into being when the child becomes a pupil. It is written from the point of view of a practising psychologist drawing on experiences of working in a unit within the Tavistock Clinic offering a specialized service for children referred with learning and school related difficulties. Interventions for the most part consist of brief, educationally focused work with families and concurrent consultation to schools.

The relationship between parents and teachers Every child in Great Britain who has reached his or her fifth year must attend school and many children begin earlier. It is at a very young age, therefore, that children must learn to make the transition between home and school, or in other words, to adapt to the rBle of go-between from one system to the other. Each system has its own boundaries, subsystems, rules and characteristic ethos and although they share the general properties of systems, they differ.

Accepted version received August 1985. *A version of this paper was given as a lecture to the Forum for Advancement of

TTavistock Clinic, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA. Educational Therapy.

79 0163-4445/86/010079+ 11 $OS.OO/O (3 1986 The Association for Family Therapy

80 D. Taylor

In becoming a pupil, the child has to negotiate his own individual transition from one system to the other. He finds himself in a triangular situation vis-&vis his parents on the one hand and his teacher on the other, each relatingmore to the child, than each other. Indeed, the child provides the only reason why parents and teachers should have a rela- tionship at all.

This is very different from the state of affairs in a family, where the parents, although in a potentially triangular situation with their child, relate personally to each other quite apart from the relationship they have with their child. We know that when parents use their child to detour negative or conflicted aspects of their relationship, the child is likely to have problems dealing with this (Minuchin, 1974). He has to ally himself either with one or the other parent or reject them both; this he can only do intermittently, if at all. Not only is a child not in a position to live independently in a material sense, but the emotional tie and need to preserve the parents, or at least one of them, is verystrong and important for the basic emotional stability of the individual.

In contrast to such natural underpinning in the form of affection and attachment, the school relies on social and cultural factors to support its ties to parents and children. These will be a more powerful force with families who strive towards conformity than with those who live more on the fringe of society or who have values and views on education which differ from those held by the majority. Some parents go to the length of withdrawing their children from the education system and are prepared to take responsibility for educating them at home. This may bring them into conflict with the education authority, who must enforce minimum standards and ensure that children will not be deprived of educational opportunities.

These are extreme situations but illustrate the fact that home and school are two different systems which are drawn together for specific tasks and for time limited periods while the child is a pupil.

It is not surprising that the ambivalence in the relationship between parents and teachers is never far concealed, even if all goes well. Parents may fear that the teacher will not give their child the attention and care that they would wish him to have; they may fear the teacher’s criticism of their parenting and that their child has unacceptable qualities or deficiencies implying the same of themselves; and they may fear that the teacher will alienate the child from them and influence him to look down on them and reject their beliefs and ways of living.

Teachers in their turn have mixed feelings about parents. They can feel burdened by parents’ high and often unrealistic expectations of

The child as go-between 81

what they can achieve with the children and fear their criticism; they feel resentful at what can seem as having children ‘dumped’ on them by parents who wish to pass on the major load of responsibility; and they can come to think that they understand children and meet their needs better than the parents, whom they may see as being overindulgent-or as using their children for their own selfish ends.

The relationship between parents and teachers is therefore potentially fraught with mutual projections. It is only too easy for parents to see teachers as authority figures, with all the feelings based on their personal experience that this evokes. While teachers, for their part, in caring for other people’s children, are particularly liable to project onto the children’s parents feelings and attitudes they have about their own parents.

The child as go-between

The child then, has to manage not only to move back and forth between two systems whose cultures will differ to a greater or lesser extent, but must do this in a climate of relationships which may vary from friendly, to covertly or overtly hostile and critical. When this becomes difficult, how do children cope?

Dz‘vi.de and cope

One of the simplest ways is to keep the worlds of home and school as separate as possible; in other words, to make use of the device of splitting or dissociation, which attempts to break up the triangular relationship into two separate ones, leaving the go-between to cope with the split in himself (Figure 1). In this r61e the child talks as little as possible about school at home and vice versa. A meeting between parents and teachers becomes a source of anxiety or embarrassment. The child may be a different person at home and at school, leading a

C h

Figure 1. P: parent: S: school; C: child

82 D. Taylor

Jekyll and Hyde existence. If he is in trouble in one setting, it is dif- ficult or impossible to ask for help from the other, so alien do the two systems appear. Mild degrees of this coping mechanism are common and are normally handled tactfully by parents and teachers who are able to keep the ambivalence in their relationship in balance for the good of the child.

The go-between as victim In more extreme situations the child can neither tolerate the tension in the go-between rBle nor deal with it by keeping the two systems separate from one another. The solution then most commonly adopted is to ally oneself with one and reject the other, thus transforming the triangle into a coalition between the two parties against a third.

There are two variations of this (Figure 2):

C h C h

( a 1 ( b l Figure 2.

In (a) the child draws closer to the parents and complains of unsympathetic teachers and bullying children. The parents rally round their child in spite of their disappointment in him for not being a successful go-between. The triangular relationship becomes sharply skewed against the school.

A good example of this type of constellation is Susie, a ten-year-old child and her elderly parents. They came to the clinic in despair and anger at their failure to change what they saw as the dismissive attitude of teachers, and to improve relationships with other children for Susie, who saw herself as shunned, ridiculed and scapegoated. They had already thought that the only solution was a fresh start in a new school, and feelings at an early stage became so intense that they carried out this plan. Susie moved to another school, which the parents hoped would provide the gentler, more controlled environment which Susie seemed to need. This improved matters briefly but did not solve the problem, although this experience, with the help of the family sessions, did help to shift the parents’ massive identification with their persecuted child.

In (b) the child makes a closer relationship with a senior teacher, such as a head of house, head of year, deputy head, school counsellor or the head or class teacher in a primary school and confides, or lets it

The child as go-between 83

be discovered, that he is neglected, not understood, treated badly or victimized at home. The relationship then becomes skewcd against the parents, with the school taking up the cause of the child.

Adrian, for example, was the only son of a forty-two-year-old single mother who lived with her parents in a cramped flat. The headmistress felt concerned that this well-developed nine-and-a-half-year-old boy was not only overprotected by his mother but was also at the mercy of the conflicting views of mother and grandmother as to how he should be brought up. As a result he mostly pleased himself and did little of what was asked of him. Adrian was rather overweight, but his mother dressed him in brief shorts, which exposed him to the taunts of his schoolmates who all wore long trousers. She did not work, since she felt she must devote all her energies to Adrian. She would bring him to school and take him right into his classroom and often had fussy com- plaints to make to the class teacher. When Adrian became involved in an argument with another boy, the two mothers had a public scene by the school gates, and the mother of the other boy came to complain to the headmistress.

In class, Adrian, who was generally recognized as an intelligent boy, repeated the pattern described at home; he produced little or no written work to the frustration of his teacher, and was falling behind in his attainments. At home he had become adept at playing off his mother against the grandmother and at school this situation was mirrored in the relationships between Adrian, his class teacher and his remedial teacher. The headmistress and teachers were exasperated with Adrian’s mother and blamed her for perpetuating Adrian’s immature behaviour and interfering in the boy’s development, but had come to feel quite helpless as to how to deal with her. She took up an inordinate amount of their time, but their desire to keep on friendly terms in the face of her condemnatory attitude had resulted in a complete stalemate.

In this case it was possible for the psychologist to work both with the family, including the grandparents, and the school by focusing first on who was in charge of Adrian. But things were more complicated; it was discovered that Adrian was also the victim of a family secret. He was not to know who his father was, although the latter lived close by and was treated by the family as an acquaintance. The unspoken, but imperative family requirement for Adrian not to know was a powerful factor in keeping him in a childish, immature position which interfered with his learning at school, whereby he might come across knowledge which might be dangerous.

84 D. Taylor

In other cases one parent joins the child in the victim position and the other parent becomes the guilty one. For example, in one family, father and daughter were seen by the school to be struggling with an unstable alcoholic wife and mother. In another a mother and son were living in terror of a violent husband and father. In both cases the school was rendered impotent in trying to deal with the child’s misdemeanours because these had to be kept secret from the isolated parent, for fear of the serious consequences for the family. In these cases it was not possible to work with the family beyond one or two school based sessions but these, coupled with consultation to the school staff and the establishment of an agreed programme for the child, helped the schoo1 to regain its competence and initiative.

Authority and deprivation as central issues for families and schools As part of our research of families with a child referred for an educational problem (Dowling and Osborne, 1985) we wanted to study family interaction patterns. We started by identifying a variety of themes which seemed to crop up frequently in the family interviews. Gradually we have come to see that most of them, e.g. control, success/failure, denigration, could be grouped under two broad categories-authority and deprivation. If we take ‘deprivation’ to be the negative of ‘care’, then we can see that we have arrived at the familiar and essential two poles of ‘care’ and ‘control’ which both children and adults need if they are to thrive.

Our theme, ‘authority’ certainly includes issues of control. Schools as institutions must find ways of controlling and managing large groups of pupils, and teachers must have control of their classes if they are to be able to teach. Parents, too, must exercise authority over their children for whom they are responsible. Gradually parents and teachers must adjust the degree to which children can be responsible for themselves, as they mature. This is not an easy task and accounts for a good deal of the strain of being a parent or a teacher.

Parents and teachers generally have the greatest power over a child. Both have the duty to further the social, moral and intellectual development of the children in their charge. Teachers, however, since they have the aspects of children’s education delegated to them by society and the law, have the status of experts in this field and carry the authority of professionals. This, coupled with teachers’ need to control, makes them particularly liable not only to be seen as authority figures, but also to succumb to the temptation of becoming authoritarian. This state of affairs i s not peculiar to the teaching

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profession. Medical practitioners, for example, are in a similar position. They need the ‘compliance’ of patients if they are to treat them successfully and they have a concept of a ‘good’ patient, just as teachers do of a ‘good’ pupil. Hospitals, like schools, cater for those who are, by definition, in a dependent position, with patients becoming child-like and doctors and nurses taking on a r61e which combines parental authority with educational features.

Pupils often leave school before they have an opportunity to relate to teachers on a more mature basis and do not have a relationship with teachers again until their own children start school. It is then that the often unresolved old feelings about authority and dependency- ‘them’ against ‘us’-are reawakened. This is particularly so when as parents they are struggling to define their own authority vis-2-vis their children, where they will also inevitably be influenced by their experience with their own parents when they were growing up. The three-generational dimension is important, not only for parents in their attitudes, practices and beliefs or ‘myths’ (Byng-Hall, 1973) which they pass on to their children, but also for teachers and all those who have responsibility for training and bringing on the next generation.

This is true also of the other theme pervading the family sessions, which we have labelled ‘deprivation’. This has less to do with the actual status of the parents-whether financial, social or educational- but is more a subjective feeling of being underprivileged, less favoured by fortune and people, less successful and with greater obstacles to contend with than others. They feel chained to the underdog position and cannot free themselves from it, however hard they may try and in spite of any success that may come their way. Susie’s parents, in the example given earlier, certainly saw themselves as failures, although both were gifted people. Susie’s father had won a scholarship to Cambridge but felt he had missed out on the promotion ladder at his work. Her mother had had success as an artist, but felt she must limit herself for the most part to teaching, as a professional artistic career would need her total commitment and was incompatible in her view with looking after a husband, daughter and home. They were both lonely people who had found a bond in their shared feeling of being deprived of a satisfactory pursuit of their gifts by a basic lack, which they described as an awkwardness in mixing with people, a social inhibition or inadequacy. Susie was thus at the receiving end of a strong double negative message from her parents and acted accord- ingly. Not only was her class work not good enough, but worse still, she

06 D. Tuylor

was unpopular and ‘bullied’ by the other children. The parents sus- pected that the teachers, too, were unsympathetic and neglectful in trying to improve the situation.

Adrian’s mother felt deprived because she felt she never had a pro- per education and could have done better than working as a waitress. She had great hopes that Adrian would make up for what she had missed. She also desperately needed to control his life because she felt he was all she had. If he discovered who his father was she might eventually lose her central place in his attachment. On another level she was still engaged in a fight with her ageing parents about authority, control and dependence and Adrian was the pawn in this ‘game’. This does not mean that he was a non-participating pawn -- he knew just what it took to keep the ‘game’ going and ensure his key posi- tion. He was also able to re-enact an essential feature of the ‘game’ in school, where not only the remedial teacher and class teacher were competing to know what was best for Adrian, but the school as a whole was aligned alongside Adrian against his mother. It is important to remember that the go-between is part of the wider home-school system and makes his own contribution in skewing the triangle.

Failures in learning are often strongly connected to issues of authority and control and can only be understood when the context of personal meaning becomes clear. For example (i) children who are locked in a pattern where authority is equated with a dangerous aggression and must therefore be inhibited, even if used for learning; (ii) children for whom not learning is an expression of loyalty to their parents who have failed in learning themselves or who hold to an anti- establishment position; (iii) children who are caught up in the fight between a parent and teacher as to who is more competent in getting the child to learn; (iv) others, whose classwork is abysmal but exam results excellent -or the other way round- just to prove who is in control.

The study of the content of family sessions and the discussion of the emergent themes have so far put an emphasis on the home in relation to the school. Teachers are themselves members of families and subject to the influence of family attitudes and the threr generational cycle which will affect the way they relate to their pupils.

Some months ago, for example, I visited the Head of House of a secondary comprehensive school who had referred a thirteen-year-old girl who was getting into trouble over her school work and had recently been discovered truanting. Her older sister, Tina, was a model pupil in the sixth form and was planning to go on to further education with the

The child as go-between 87

ambition of becoming a teacher. The Head of House told me what a splendid youngster this girl was, carrying the main burden of the household including looking after her wayward younger sister and a brother. The father had died about a year ago and the mother worked long hours as a nurse to support her family. The Head of House was obviously very much taken up with this family’s circumstances but quite unsympathetic about the effect of the father’s death on the children, making the older girl become over-responsible and the younger rebellious. She declared that her sympathies were all with Tina-she said that she was an older sister herself and had to support her young sister through all her troubles before she herself could follow her own career plans and she knew what a thankless task that was. She did not want Tina to waste years of her life in a similar fashion and felt that either the mother should take responsibility or the troublesome younger sister should go to boarding school.

Usually we do not know enough about the teacher’s background to make the connections and this is neither necessary nor appropriate for a consultation to be useful. Teachers are human and not immune to the influence of their own life experience and background. Although their professional training makes teachers more aware of their own biases, these do occasionally interfere. Caplan (1970) called this process ‘theme interference’ and described the methods he evolved to deal with it in his book on Mental Health Consultation. Teachers naturally express their personalities and attitudes in the climate they foster in their classrooms and these can differ markedly. Some teachers will create a quiet, peaceful atmosphere in their classes by fostering dependence and conformity. Their troublesome pupil is the lively, boisterous child who likes to take initiatives. Other teachers foster the independence of pupils. They encourage initiative, present them with choices and expect them to provide their own motivation to learn. The atmosphere in such a cl-ass will be much more robust and bracing. Here the pupil in trouble will be the shy, retiring, less confident child or the one who has come from an unorganized, erratic home where he has perhaps already experienced many changes and who needs to be able to depend on a safe, enduring structure if he is to be able to learn.

Teachers, however, do not teach in a vacuum but are part of a larger system, the school, which will have its own history, traditions and culture. The importance of the ethos of the institution in its effect on the performance of those within it , whether staff or pupils, has been attested by a growing number of researchers. It has been shown, for example, that there are wide and consistent differences between

88 D. Taylor

schools, drawing their pupils from a homogeneous area, in attendance, academic attainment and delinquency (Reynolds, 1977; Power, 1967; Rutter, 1979). The hopeful implication of these studies is that schools, as institutions, can serve as positive environments which can defuse or dilute the negative and vulnerable aspects which the go-between brings with him from home or the neighbourhood. The opposite, of course, is also true, namely that schools can fuel and provoke problems if they cannot both care and control and provide a proper balance between the two.

The ‘good’ parent and the successful go-between Researchers have shown that features to do with the home, particularly parents’ attitudes, are correlated to pupil achievement. If parents are interested in the child’s school work, supportive of the activities of teachers and in consensus with the school culture, their child is likely to be more successful academically and well adjusted socially (Floud et al . , 1956; Douglas, 1964; Wiseman, 1964; Plowden, 1967; Goodacre, 1968). In other words, ‘good’ parents produced ‘good’ pupils. It has also been shown that parents of low socioeconomic status were much less likely to produce successful pupils. What then, are the key features in the successful parent rde?

Sharp and Green (1975) in their study of progressive primary educa- tion isolate the major factors as being the parents’ Zbility to give the impression of being a ‘good’ parent. They need not really be interested in the child’s school work, really be supportive of the teachers’ activities nor really subscribe to the school’s culture; the important factor is that they should convince the teacher that this is so and in turn accept the teacher’s presentations of herself as a ‘good’ teacher, i.e. someone who is willing to listen, respect the parents’ views and have the child’s ‘real interests’ at heart, whatever views she may privately hold about the educability of the child.

The good parent, therefore, is one who can cue in successfully to what the teacher’s views of a good parent are and defers to her superior expertise. Most importantly, however, the good parent must teach his child to act discreetly at school and not let on that his parents are telling him what to do at school or are teaching him at home. The child, Sharp and Green conclude, is therefore ‘crucial as a mediator in the successful parent-teacher relationship’. To be a successful go- between the child has to act his r d e with tact and discretion in the almost ritualized interplay between parent and teacher. Our own studies have shown us that this is much more difficult if feelings about

The child as go- between 89

authority or deprivation get in the way, either from the direction of the parents or from the teachers.

Conclusion

The go-between is the link between home and school and as such bears the brunt of the strain in the relationship between the two. His exposed position is underlined by the fact that it is invariably the child occupying the r61e who is labelled as the problem, even if either of the other parties may confide that ‘there is nothing wrong with X- his parents, or his teachers, are the real problems’. If professionals are involved, the convention is that the child is referred, never the teachers or parents. Yet, as I hope I have been able to show, all three have their part to play in the complex and subtle interactions, relationships and manoeuvres that are set in motion within the triangle of home, school and child.

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